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Science Technology

Rocket Fuel Speeds Transistors 46

Posted by michael from the firey-performance dept.
Mick Ohrberg writes "The rocket fuel hydrazine has been proven to increase the speed of thin-film transistors, which are used in LCD displays. It's also much cheaper to produce these transistors in a new "wet" manufacturing technique, based on creating the thin layers by using the centrifugal force caused by spinning the substrate. The result? Well, if the manufacturing cost plummets, maybe that 42" LCD monitor for my PC will be within (financial) reach soon."
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Rocket Fuel Speeds Transistors More

Rocket Fuel Speeds Transistors

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  • Sounds great... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Randolpho ( 628485 ) on Thursday March 18, 2004 @11:06AM (#8598556) Homepage Journal
    ... until your monitor launches into orbit.
  • The end of CRT?

    And does this increase the refresh rate of the monitor?

    • Re:So... (Score:2, Informative)

      by flewp ( 458359 )
      CRT won't die until the price of LCD's go down (which this could help) and maybe more importantly, when the quality of LCD's (color depth/range, "refresh rates" etc) matches CRTs.

      • Re:So... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Tailhook ( 98486 ) on Thursday March 18, 2004 @02:27PM (#8601161)
        CRT won't die until...

        Define death. If LCD compromises performance (refresh, etc.) but not price, odds are the market will go 99% LCD and CRT will be rarified to specialty niches at very, very high cost. So while it will still be possible to get a CRT, you won't be able to afford it.

        LCD and plasma already attain sufficiant performance for the bulk of what the market wants. The only issue remaining is price. Those people who really need CRT (a small fraction of those that will think they do,) will just have to get funded.

      • Re:So... (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Mr. Slippery ( 47854 )
        when the quality of LCD's (color depth/range, "refresh rates" etc) matches CRTs.

        For text-based applications (which is most of what comptuers are used for), LCD give superior quality to CRTs. No flicker and sharper pixels. I'm never going back.

        • I disagree. (Score:3, Informative)

          by quinkin ( 601839 )
          I disagree.

          Refresh rate, pixel decay rates, attainable colour space, non-native resolution pixel interpolation, RGB vs BGR for sub-pixel antialiasing, mean time to failure and fade, (semi) standard interfaces, etc...

          As far as I am concerned, with no ego/space/power consumption restrictions, a CRT is far and away superior for most applications.

          Re: the text performance on LCD, I assume you are using subpixel interpolation to get a usable display? Or are you just referring to DOS style low res character

          • I disagree.

            I suppose what makes a superior display is in the eyes (literally) of the beholder.

            You should NEVER have visible flicker on a decent CRT (unless you are comparing your new 2003 LCD to your old 14" running @60Hz)

            I find anything below 70 Hz completely unusable, and have to get close to 80 before the problem goes away completely. Of course I've always adjusted my own machines accordingly, but I still occasionally encounter machines where the damn monitor looks like a strobelight to me. (Es

    • I didn't see anything about increasing the luminenscence (sp?) of the screens. I don't think this will be the end of CRT. I, for one, prefer CRT for my gaming. Of course, for my TV/Movie watching....
  • This is great news! I was considering purchasing an LCD monitor the always found the refresh rates were always way to slow for most gaming (unless I wanted to spend big $). Now with this new technique maybe the LCD refresh rates will be comparable to CRT's......

  • This is hot! (Score:4, Funny)

    by jbarr ( 2233 ) on Thursday March 18, 2004 @11:26AM (#8598782) Homepage
    Now I can tell people that my LCD really smokes!

  • OLED influenced as well? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by geschild ( 43455 ) on Thursday March 18, 2004 @11:38AM (#8598917) Homepage

    I'm wondering: as I understood it, the LCD plants need only minor changes to be able to put out OLED panels instead of TFT/LCD.

    If this process is little different from LCD manufacturing and LCD is not very different from OLED, will OLED benefit as well?

    • Re:OLED influenced as well? (Score:5, Informative)

      by TheClam ( 209230 ) on Thursday March 18, 2004 @12:32PM (#8599550)
      Hydrazine doesn't play nicely with organics, and there's no tin sulphide in an OLED, so no.

    • Re:OLED influenced as well? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Komi ( 89040 ) on Thursday March 18, 2004 @07:15PM (#8604422) Homepage
      Acording to this other article [eetimes.com] it seems like TFT benefitted from OLED techniques, rather than the reverse. OLED semiconductors are popular they can be disolved into a liquid. In that form, it's very easy and cheap to build the circuit. It's much more expensive to work with TFT semiconductors. Well now they've figured out how to disolve TFT semiconductors into a liquid. TFT semiconductors have much better electrical properties. So you get the performance of TFT at the cost of OLED.

      I'm no expert on this, so go read online for more info.

      Komi

      • If this is true, than that would be a pitty since it would almost certainly mean that OLED's place in the lime-light would be postponed for as long as possible. (To recoup the investments made in TFT).

        This is unfortunate because OLED holds so much more promise than TFT, especially in energy conservation and clarity of the picture.

        Oh well, this is how things go.

        Thanks for the info!

  • ...that these will give a new meaning to the term "Blazingly Fast!"?

  • LCD tech is rocket science now? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Jtheletter ( 686279 ) on Thursday March 18, 2004 @11:40AM (#8598941)
    So for those who rtf, what I want to know is at what point did David Mitzi say to himself, "Geez, if only I could dissolve this tin disulphide in something really caustic. Like gasoline, only waaaay stronger... Hmmm, Mary could you bring me some of that hydrazine we have laying around? I think it's behind my lunch in the minifridge..." ??

  • Fire! (Score:2)

    by GoRK ( 10018 )
    This kind of reminds me of that time they wanted to make the hindenberg shiny so they put some thermite in the silver color... and we all know how that ended up!

    • Re:Fire! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by goneutt ( 694223 )
      The impermeable skin of the Hindenburg was made of canvas treated with a solution that included more than a touch of nitric acid. Cellulose + Nitric acid= Nitro Cellulose aka guncotton aka Celludloid film which early movies used, resulting in the occasional projection booth fire.

      If only gigli had been filmed on this stuff.

  • Hydrazine: Bad Stuff (Score:5, Informative)

    by whorfin ( 686885 ) on Thursday March 18, 2004 @12:31PM (#8599539)
    From the EPA [epa.gov] and CDC [cdc.gov]. Perhaps Outsourcing LCD production is a good thing, after all?
    • Kinda makes you wonder what will happen when your monitor cracks in a house fire. Is it going to make everyone who has one of these look like an arsonist? Will clever arsonists use this to try to avoid detection?
    • Outsourcing LCD production is a good thing, after all?

      It always has been. Nearly all LCD devices are produced by a small number of Taiwanese manufacturers and repackaged by everyone else.

  • More uses (Score:4, Informative)

    by Lars T. ( 470328 ) <{Lars.Traeger} {at} {googlemail.com}> on Thursday March 18, 2004 @01:13PM (#8600119) Journal
    This article (in German) [heise.de] says that you can make cheap, flexible electronics with this stuff.
  • The rocket fuel hydrazine has been proven to increase the speed of thin-film transistors

    So? Rocket fuel can increase the speed of lots of things..you just have to put them in the payload ;-)

  • Then kids start sniffing LCD panels instead of sniffing solvents. In the other news, FDA now classifies LCD panels as controlled substance...

    • Re:Sniffing LCD panel (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Okay. Just to be clear: Sniffing hydrazine will kill you VERY QUICKLY. That stuff is NASTY.

  • Hydrazine? Tin Disulfide? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by StateOfTheUnion ( 762194 ) on Thursday March 18, 2004 @03:14PM (#8601747) Homepage
    . . . And if the LCD cracks, should I call a HAZMAT team to clean it up?

  • Just for the record... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Zordak ( 123132 ) on Thursday March 18, 2004 @03:32PM (#8601970) Homepage Journal
    Everyone can get their underpants in a know and call me pedantic, but this is one of my Physics pet peeves. The process cannot use "centrifugal force" to create thin layers of anything, because there is no such thing as "centrifugal force". A body in circuilar motion will have radial and tengential acceleration components. Since F=m a, you can only ascribe forces to your acceleration components. More likely, it is the tangential force that spreads the stuff into thin layers.

    • Re:Just for the record... (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It's a semantic use that is understood by most english speakers with a scientific background. Furthermore, nonscientifically minded english speakers can understand the meaning observationally. Therefore, it doesn't matter that they're wrong.

      Also, for the record, time does not actually fly as it is not a physical thing.
    • It's a force in the relative, but not the inertial frame.

      That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, so shut up and go draw some freebodies.

      (from the viewpoint of the object rotating around an axis, the centripital force is not found, so if one were studying the forces within the body without reference to the external rotation, the centrifugal force is necesary)

    • You sir, are a pedant.

      There is nothing I love more than a physicist trying to be pedantic. Especially when the next sentence starts: "A body..."

      After all to pedantically model fluid flow on a rotating plane we should start by reducing it to a one body equation...

      Q. (Yes ok you are technically correct, but technically the catholic church was correct in saying the universe revolves around the earth. They just used a different frame of reference. :)

      • (Yes ok you are technically correct, but technically the catholic church was correct in saying the universe revolves around the earth. They just used a different frame of reference. :)

        I am so glad that someone else has realized this, I was begining to think that I was the only one thatunderstood the implication of Einstein to Theology. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Now I know I'm not the lone weirdo in the universe!

        The Wildman
    • Well, theoretically there may be no such thing as a centrifugal force, but in practice it makes a lot of sense to have a name for the relative force caused by centripetal acceleration. And calling it a tangential force makes almost no sense because there is nothing tangential about the centripetal acceleration - in fact if you are using a polar coordinate system (which it makes sense to do in this case) that tangential force is solely responsible for an angular acceleration and is actually completely perpen
      • You're missing one very important point here, which is the actual reason that I have such a problem with the misnomer "centrifugal force." Now let's assume a spherical cow. His name is Bob. Bob is in a centrifuge, perhaps the kind that is found at an amusement park, where you are smashed against the wall and the floor drops out. The centrifuge is spinning at full speed, and Bob is pinned to the wall, when suddenly, through some freak accident of quantum physics, the wall disappears instantaneously. What
  • ... that hi tech is rocket science.

  • If you think hydrazine is bad stuff, you should consider what goes into typical semiconductor manufacturing. Hydrazine is a simple compound of nitrogen and hydrogen. It's highly reactive, and it's only used in this process to spread one of the layers onto the substrate for making TFTs.
    It is not present in the finished LCD product, so it's not going to kill you if you buy an LCD monitor, and it breaks. There are much nastier chemicals used all the time in manufacturing. You should be more concerned abo

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